“G’day to all the good folk at Catholic Answers. Words cannot express the invaluable service you provide to the world. Your faith tracts are fantastic and should be a must-read. Catholics need to be equipped with the history and the truth.”

The other day, a childhood friend contacted me through Facebook. She had been raised Catholic but now does not believe in God. She knows that I am a convert to Catholicism who writes on religious subjects and wanted to know what drew me to Catholicism and how I could remain Catholic. She wasn't arguing against belief in God; she was simply curious how I could affiliate with a religion that, for many people, does not seem to value women and that many are leaving.

A man died on the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, this past Sunday. He was a priest, theologian, and author, well-known in Catholic circles for writing books and articles that were theologically problematic. He was, one might say for lack of a better descriptor, a "liberal Catholic." As news of his death spread around cyberspace, Catholics on both sides of the Catholic theological spectrum commented on his passing in social media.

I recently received a couple of apologetics inquiries that may not seem related on the surface, but that I believe are suggestive of a common problematic approach to the Mass. The first was about the propriety of Christmas pageants in church. The inquirer was very obviously put off by the common custom of small children acting out the Christmas story for the benefit of parishioners, and wanted to know if this kind of spectacle was appropriate in a church dedicated to the worship of God:...

I'm not a person who naturally thrives in silence. During Lent, I have a hard time keeping the radio turned off in my car for the ten-minute drive to work. It is rather amazing then how annoyed I can become with unnecessary noise before and after Mass. And if the questions on the subject that the apologists get at Catholic Answers are any indication, many Catholics are disturbed by unnecessary noise at Mass. Here is a representative example:

When I go surfing on the Internet, I have a wide range of web sites I visit—including strange sites maintained by eccentrics at both ends of the Catholic spectrum. I do this because I have found that you can find the most interesting things in the craziest places. For example, the other day I was browsing through a sedevacantist site.

In the midst of headlines that warned of impending doom on all fronts of the Church, I found a link to an English translation of an essay written in the...

"In the week immediately before Lent everyone shall go to his confessor and confess his deeds and the confessor shall so shrive him as he then may hear by his deeds what he is to do [in the way of penance]."

~ Anglo-Saxon "Ecclesiastical Institutes" translated from Theodulphus by Abbot Aelfric about A.D. 1000; explaining the English term "shrovetide" (from "to shrive", or hear confessions) wherein the religious idea is uppermost; but before long, human nature allowed itself some exceptional licence.